


Repentance

by michi (spicyhorses)



Category: UTAU
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Child Death, Christianity, Death, Depression, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Family, Family Feels, God - Freeform, Grief, Illnesses, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Leukemia, Loss, Misotheism, Other, Past Character Death, Self-Hatred, Terminal Illnesses, UTAU - Freeform, but they don't know it's leukemia bc the good ol days, gekiyaku - Freeform, kazehiki - Freeform, poor kazehiki, this bicth hates god and it's a fuckin mood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 21:03:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19281148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyhorses/pseuds/michi
Summary: On the anniversary of her dear brother's death, Gekiyaku shuts herself in and reflects on their time together, her vain attempts to cure his illness, and the monster she's become.





	Repentance

Today. A day long-awaited by the public, the one where I shut myself in and never leave the property, never smear their ‘sinless’ lives with my filth simply by existing. A day where there is nothing to do but sit and think. The one day a year that I allow myself to cry, the day where I act as he would want me to rather than acting like the abomination I’ve let myself become.

 

The anniversary of my brother’s death. Each year that passes just drills into my head how unfair, cruel, uncaring, monstrous, and malicious God truly is. My brother was a living angel, with the purest heart that he devoted entirely to the Lord and following his teachings. I guess God thought it was funny. God thought it would be a hilarious prank to play and laugh over hysterically with the seraphs up in Heaven, strike this devout child with a terminal illness and watch him waste away while his sister loses her mind attempting to find a nonexistent cure. Or maybe the cure did exist, and maybe I’ve found it by now – I’ll never get to know.

 

And so my brother lies six feet under the ground, buried in that stupid traditional white gown with a cross of wood as a headstone behind our house, his name carved intricately into it by yours truly.

 

* * *

 

 Kazehiki and I were as close as siblings could be. We never fought, only playful teasing that led to more laughter. We attended school and church, we were good kids that were always praised by the priests and nuns. I got better grades than he did, but he was smart nonetheless, and he was the one that did all of his penance whenever he did his weekly confession, studied all of his bible verses and did everything he could do to be the beloved lamb of God that he was. I slacked off. I admired how devoted he was to God, but I did say on more than one occasion that he should shift some of that dedication to his studies – there were never any fights over it, but he would get a tiny flare of anger in his eyes whenever I said that, like it was heresy. Perhaps it was, at least to him.

 

My brother was a funny kid. He was quick-witted and never failed to make others laugh, and sometimes cringe with stupid puns. He had a beautiful singing voice, too – angelic in nature, just like the rest of him. He would sing whenever he got the chance, even when he was sick and his voice was crackly and weak. I tried to sing with him, and he would always encourage me to, but my voice wasn’t quite as graceful as his. He never judged my singing, though, nor did he judge any of my other shortcomings. He would probably – no, definitely – judge me now, though, no matter how much I’d like to believe otherwise.

 

He never made it to the age where we learned about human anatomy and the differences between boys and girls. One morning, while I was cooking our breakfast, he ran up behind me, nearly in tears trying to figure out why his penis was hard when he woke up. “Geki, does yours ever do this?! Am I ill?! Does your thing ever get stiff?!” It was all I could do not to burst into laughter. I took the eggs out of the pan and laid them on the plates before turning to him and assuring him that he wasn’t sick, this just happens to boys when they wake up sometimes. He started asking why, and I, knowing the anatomical answer, told him exactly why. He looked disturbed, but at the same time relieved to know that he wasn’t a heretic or dying because of his morning erection. That was also the day he learned that girls didn’t have penises, and the start of a series of many, many questions.

 

We found the most bizarre ways to entertain ourselves. We made our own toys because we couldn’t buy any, which in the act itself wasn’t so bizarre, but the toys we made certainly were. At one point I made him his own ball-in-a-cup… He always wanted one. I had no idea why, because I could make so many things that were much more interesting, but I crafted and painted his with a tiny little mural of the two of us as angels. He was the creative one, and would come up with ideas for toys while I would build them. Board games with whimsical storylines, dolls made of scrap materials, functional wind-up robot toys, and we even made a game that involved wooden teeth as playing pieces. We sold the games and toys to children around our town, and we actually did end up earning some money. We kept it in a safe place for when we grew up.

 

The church took care of us in place of our absent parents, though we lived in our own home not far away from the chapel. They would make sure we were fed and clothed and warm during the harsh winters. And Kazehiki was always prone to sickness in the winters, so they took care of him until he was better, too. Of course I worried when he was sick, because medicine was so hard to come across and so many people died of seasonal illnesses, but he always got better, so I never worried much. That is, until he didn’t get better.

 

I can’t imagine Hell being any worse than that winter was.

 

He had developed unusual symptoms, not a simple seasonal sickness – he would cough up blood, have bouts of severe anorexia and night sweats, suffer from aching bones and petechiae. He was lethargic and short of breath with headaches that would cause him to be unable to sleep even when he needed to. The physician didn’t know what to make of it and told me point blank: “Make sure the boy is pampered and given the best quality of life, because he is sure to die.”

 

That’s what I did. Kazehiki’s every want and need was taken care of, even the ones he didn’t know he had. I spent all of the time that he was awake by his bedside, cracking jokes and reading and pretending that everything would be okay even though we both knew that it wouldn’t be. Kazehiki demanded to go to church on Sunday mornings, but instead I convinced one of the priests to come to our home and deliver the sermon to him personally. My brother couldn’t leave the house.

 

When he wasn’t awake, or when he had visitors, I took my knowledge of medicine and began to formulate remedies. I took to a life of thievery and heinous acts to get the money for what I needed in order to create drugs and examine his blood under a microscope. What I saw didn’t tell me much, other than giving me an idea that is unpleasant to recall. I drew blood from healthy people to compare to his, and what I saw in his samples were an overabundance of certain cells and a lack of others. Treatments for visible, tumorous cancers are being invented rapidly, but none seem to have considered the possibility of a cancer of the blood.

 

I tested the medicines on myself first, often making myself sick with side effects, and those would be thrown aside without having him take them – when I came to a formulation that had little ill effect on me and could possibly help him I had him take it, but he only got sicker and sicker no matter the medicine.

 

I made a coffin for my brother from the wood of our walnut tree, lined with satin. It was labor-intensive, not only physically but also emotionally and even financially. It was a project that made me wish to die, not that I wasn’t already wishing to take his place so he could live.

 

One night, as we lay nestled under the covers and huddled together, he asked me if he was going to die. I almost began to cry, because I knew he would. I didn’t want to lie to him; I simply told him that he would feel better soon. He believed in Heaven, as did I, so no matter whether he died or got better, things would improve for him.

 

It was very evident when his time was drawing near. He couldn’t eat without vomiting and most of his time was spent sleeping. I worked harder and harder, driving myself insane reading every book in existence about modern medicine, in a vain attempt to find the magic bullet that would cure my brother and make him well. Whenever he opened his eyes, I rushed to his side. Whatever he wanted, I would get for him. When he wanted to pray, we would pray until he fell asleep again. I would pray on my own, too, for God to end my brother’s suffering, but not by killing him – I would pray for God to let Kazehiki see his bright future. With each day that passed without that prayer being answered, I got angrier and angrier at that bastard that lives in the clouds.

 

I developed one drug that currently has an iron grip on me. It numbs me to the pain and even makes me feel a bit of happiness and relaxation — it turned out to be habit-forming. I broke one of my own fingers just to see if the drug would ease physical pain as well, and it did. One day, when Kazehiki was in tears over the aches in his head and his bones, I offered him the drug, which had a positive effect on him. It eased his suffering, and at the time, that was the most we could ask for.

 

I gave him the drug every day during his last week of life, finding that injecting it into his blood had the most potent effect. He had bruises on his arms from the injections, which made me feel guilty as all Hell, but it was helping him live just a little bit more. He was able to stay awake, even able to eat at some points. There was a bit of hope in that small vial, but in the end, it just relieved his symptoms without curing the illness.

 

On the day he died, he told me he knew that God was in the room with us. The realization that this was it pierced through my heart like a gigantic, dull and rusty needle. We both knew. He asked me to lay with him and give him a kiss, and asked me to sing to him. Despite my lack of confidence in my singing voice, and how chaotic my voice was in comparison to his, I did it for him. I sang him a lullaby that I had written for him during this ordeal. He attempted to sing along, with a voice barely audible above the crackling of sputum and hoarseness. I cried as I sang, and eventually he stopped singing, closing his eyes and going limp in my arms, as though he were asleep. I hoped and prayed that he was just sleeping and that I could have one more day with him, but I kept singing until he stopped breathing. I kept singing until his heart ceased to beat, and only then did I stop.

 

I lay there with Kazehiki in my arms for hours, crying into his fluffy hair and holding his emaciated body against mine, almost in an attempt to warm it up from where it was cooling. And after that, I got dressed, bundled him in a blanket, and brought him to the chapel with tears of anguish falling from my eyes the entire time. The hardest part of that particular encounter with the priests and nuns was the lack of shock on their faces. Even though everyone knew this was going to happen, and I _knew_ that everyone else did, the fact that they weren’t angry or shocked by his death caused my blood to boil. I fell to my knees in front of the priests, holding my dear brother close to my chest, crying until I had no tears left to cry.

 

The day after, I cut and carved the cross, dug the grave, prepared him in his burial gown and coffin and invited everyone who loved Kazehiki to our home to deliver his funerary rites. Many people showed up, even people that I didn’t recognize who were connected to him in different ways. Our classmates, the fathers and sisters of the church, friends and certain townspeople who had gotten to know me well in my quest for the miracle drug, all dressed in black and shedding genuine tears for a boy who deserved this the least out of everyone there. The funeral was nowhere near extravagant, nowhere near what he deserved — it was too simple and far too short, but some people did stick around for a while, attempting to console me. He was committed to the earth and then sealed underneath 6 feet of soil… As each shovelful was dumped atop him, my heart sank deeper and deeper until I simply stopped responding to the condolences of Kazehiki’s loved ones, people who, for the most part, were strangers to me.

 

Thankfully they understood — a young girl having to dig her best friend’s grave and build her only family’s casket, how tragic. They didn’t blame me for shutting down that day. But when I never opened up after that, they simply moved on. There were more important things for them to worry about than the girl who wouldn’t wake up.

 

* * *

 

The first two years without Kazehiki were a continuous downward spiral. Crafting more and more drugs, becoming my own guinea pig, even harming myself with knives and needles, anything to ease the pain I would do. Nothing positive worked, no words helped, only chemicals and sharp metals.

 

I shut myself off from the public, though my presence was constant on the streets. Though I no longer had a reason to, I continued performing those heinous acts and stealing just like I had when I was desperately searching for a cure.

 

I stopped making toys and games. There was no creative force driving me and no reason to make them anymore.

 

I managed to sell the formula for the drug to which I’m addicted to the physician, who then studied it and deemed it suitable for surgeries and other painful procedures and conditions. It was sent to the higher ups in the medical field and made available nationwide — I received thanks for it, but that didn’t matter to me. It didn’t matter that I was helping so many people with my miracle symptom-reliever, because I didn’t care about other people anymore. I hate myself for it. I stopped caring about myself, too.

 

Covered in bandages and always wearing black, creating addicts and sinners of ‘innocent’ people, my existence became a smear on the face of the town and the church disowned me. I grew to hate God more and more with each day that passed. Some days I wonder if my developing hatred for him was what caused him to rip my brother away from me so cruelly. Not only did I blame God, I also blamed myself.

 

My life seems to have settled at rock bottom. Nothing is changing for better or for worse. Kazehiki is gone, I’ve accepted that there’s nothing I can do about it. Each year on this day, when I’m nowhere to be found but in the snow before my brother’s buried and decayed body, hope stirs within me that I’ll fall ill, that I’ll freeze to death while I mourn, that I’ll be able to at least meet with my brother once more in the cessation of both our heartbeats. I will go to Hell, he has no doubt gone to Heaven… But even so, we’d have that one thing in common. We’d both no longer exist.

 

* * *

 

 

God is cruel and exists only to make us suffer. He just sits back and laughs. That’s all I’ve learned. It’s just hilarious, isn’t it? Dooming a child who devoted his life to praising God’s name to die young from an illness that we have yet to understand is fucking hysterical.

 

I want to go back to the church that raised us. I want to go back, lock everyone whose faces showed no emotion in and burn the damn thing down. I want to contaminate the holy water and the wine from which they drink for communion – poison and kill every last person in this town who has abandoned me and forgotten about my dear Kazehiki. The people who stopped laying flowers at the foot of his cross – I want to bash their heads in. But most of all, after all of this has been done, I want to end my life in the most agonizing fashion that I can. I deserve it for becoming such a monster.

 

There’s so much anger and hatred within me… Whenever I sing, all it turns into is tortured screams. I can’t sing without remembering how I sang for him as he died in my arms. I can’t look at our old toys without remembering the fun we shared and grieving the loss. I can’t cook without remembering his endless barrage of questions about puberty. I can’t do anything without thinking of him, and what would normally be sadness is replaced with rage. My brother would hate that I hate everything, and I hate myself for that, too.

 

* * *

 

Kazehiki, if you’re able to hear me, I want to say that I’m sorry. I’ve never said it to you before, but I’ve become a monster and there is no taking back the things I’ve done. I don’t deserve to be sitting before you right now. I don’t deserve to cry. I don’t deserve to be called the sister of such a wonderful person. I don’t deserve to be within a kilometer of your resting place.

 

I’m sorry for everything I’ve done since I’ve been gone. I’m sorry that I’m so angry. I’m sorry that I’ve turned into a completely different person, that I’m no longer the Gekiyaku that you loved. If you’ve been watching over me this whole time like everyone says angels do, I’m sorry you’ve had to witness this.

 

* * *

  
  
I can’t change anything anymore, I’m no longer in control. As I step back into our home, as I cook a meal, as I make something or read or do anything that would be usual in his eyes, I fight the need to drown my sorrows in a vial of sweet relief. All that effort does is cause my suffering to reach its peak, but I hope it makes him happy to know that at least one day a year, I do what he’d want me to do.

 

I at least hope that God is taking care of my brother. I hope that Heaven is everything Kazehiki dreamed it would be.

 

And most of all, I hope that Kazehiki will forgive me for my sins.

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you enjoyed! :')


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